Although the Internet is a pervasive means of communicating information, it is not by any stretch of the imagination the exclusive means of doing so. The Internet has not completely replaced television and newspaper as a vehicle for conveying content to people. Those who wish to purvey content to large groups of others still often find traditional media to be an effective way of reaching an intended audience.
The Internet provides a level of interactivity that many other communication channels lack, though. Traditional television and newspaper content is “one-way” in nature. With such traditional media, content generally flows from a broadcaster or publisher to a viewer or reader, and does not provide an avenue whereby the content recipient can request customized information from the content provider. Sometimes the content recipient can respond to the content provider via other channels, such as by telephone or mail, but such channels are external to the medium by which the original content was conveyed. Using these external channels can be inconvenient for the content recipient.
Thus, outside of the Internet, viewers and readers are largely unable to demand, from content providers, additional information pertaining to the topics of the content that the viewers and readers are presented. Along with the content that they transmit, some cable and satellite television content providers include enhanced data that may indicate some details about the content that a viewer might find useful, such as names and summaries of televised programs. The information contained in such enhanced data is typically brief, often due to bandwidth limitations, and determined entirely by the content provider rather than the viewers. If the enhanced data lacks information that a viewer would like to know, the viewer is generally left without any convenient non-external means of obtaining that information. Even if the viewer had a convenient means of requesting additional information from the content provider, in many cases, the content provider might not be possession of, or in the business of supplying, the information sought.
Given the limitations of traditional media, a person will often turn to the Internet to seek additional information pertaining to content that he saw on television or read in the newspaper. Internet-based search engines enable people to obtain references to web pages that contain one or more specified words. Typically, a computer user can access a search engine by directing a web browser to a search engine “portal” web page. The portal page usually contains a text entry field and a button control. The user can initiate a search for web pages that contain specified query terms by typing those query terms into the text entry field and then activating the button control. When the button control is activated, the query terms are sent to the search engine, which typically returns, to the user's web browser, a dynamically generated web page that contains a list of references to other web pages that contain the query terms.
One drawback of using a search engine in this manner emerges from the context-insensitive manner in which search results are determined. Often, while a user is watching television or reading a newspaper, he may come across a topic about which he would like to obtain additional information. His curiosity piqued, the user might then direct his web browser to the portal page and submit, as query terms, words that he associates, in his mind, with the topic of interest. Hopefully, the results that the search engine returns include at least some references to web pages that pertain to the topic. Unfortunately, the results also may include a plethora of references to other web pages that contain the query terms, but have little or nothing to do with the topic.
For example, a user might see a television commercial for a new digital music-playing device being offered by a familiar computer-related business whose name happens to be the same as that of a fruit. The user might want to obtain additional information about the music-playing device, but he might not know what words he should use to describe the device. He might recall the name of the business from the television commercial, however. After submitting the name of the business to a search engine as a query term, the user may be disappointed to discover that the vast majority of the results returned by the search engine are references to web pages that pertain to the fruit rather than the business. The user is then faced with the options of prospecting through numerous pages of irrelevant references for a few elusive relevant references, trying to refine the query terms so that future search results will exclude irrelevant references but not relevant references, or abandoning the search entirely.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/903,283, filed on Jul. 29, 2004, discloses techniques for performing context-sensitive searches. According to one such technique, a “source” web page may be enhanced with user interface elements that, when activated, cause a search engine to provide search results that are directed to a particular topic to which at least a portion of the “source” web page pertains. For example, such user interface elements may be “Y!Q” elements, which now appear in many web pages all over the Internet. For additional information on “Y!Q” elements, the reader is encouraged to submit “Y!Q” as a query term to a search engine.
Because they may be strategically positioned in a web page in close proximity to the content about which the user would want to search for information, the user interface elements described above provide a convenient mechanism for context-sensitive searching. A user can presume that if he initiates a search using a user interface element that is positioned in close proximity to a particular paragraph of text, that the search results obtained for the search will be constrained based on the topics to which the paragraph pertains.
Although the techniques described in the aforementioned patent application are tremendously useful, the techniques are only expressly described with application to Internet-delivered content such as web pages. If a person wants to search, on the Internet, for information about something that he saw on television or read in a newspaper, the person is largely left to his own genius in deciding how to formulate query terms that will lead to search results that are narrowly tailored to the thing that he saw or read about. As is discussed above, depending on how the person formulated the query terms, the search results may be vastly over-inclusive because the search results may lack specific context.
Some content providers give a little assistance to viewers and readers who might want to pursue related topics on the Internet. For example, some television programs and some printed materials seen these days include a uniform resource locator (URL). If the viewer or reader directs his web browser to the URL, he may be presented with a web page that the content provider has supplied. The contents of that web page are entirely dictated by the content provider, however, and are not truly customized according to the viewer's desires. The web page might consist entirely of information other than that in which the viewer is actually interested.
People who are exposed to information via traditional media channels often want some way of delving deeper into what they see. Previous approaches for allowing people to do so are often less effective for the reasons discussed above.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.